A Simple And Crazy Way To Recover Your Data

Here was a real life situation I was in. I worked as a IT support staff and one day a laptop that crashed was handed to me. After some diagnostics, I found bad sectors on the hard disk and a lot of clunging sounds whenever I turned on the laptop. Unfortunately, the user have some crucial data on the hard disk and need to have it in 24 hours.

The BIOS wasn’t able to detect the hard disk. So I did some searching on the internet and found a real crazy way to recover the data. So, I decided to put it to the test since I have tried other ways to recover the data without success. I remove the hard disk from the laptop and put in the refrigerator!

Now it’s important you do not put the hard disk in the refrigerator for too long. I put it in for about 30 minutes and then quickly attached the hard disk to an external hard disk casing and connected it to another computer via the USB port.

Surprisingly, it worked, the hard disk was detected and I copied the crucial data that the user needed to the computer as fast as I could.

I have done this a couple of times since then and it does worked. However, I found it will only work for a brief period of time. Usually, you will have a period of about 15 to 20 minutes so you need to copy as fast as possible to your computer once the hard disk is working.

USAF looks beyond backup to data recovery

The Air Force Center for Environmental Excellence, with headquarters at Brooks City-Base, Texas, is a field operating agency of the Air Force Civil Engineer. The center provides Air Force leaders with the comprehensive expertise they need to protect, preserve, restore, develop and sustain our nation's environmental and installation resources. The agency employs 315 authorized civilians and 46 military members. In addition to its in-house staff, AFCEE has many of the nation's most respected and capable contractors as its partners. The center's multibillion dollar contracting capacity covers the entire spectrum of environmental and construction management services. AFCEE provides a complete range of professional and technical services, including IT, in environmental and installation planning and engineering and military housing construction and privatization.

AFCEE also operates remote facilities in Atlanta, Dallas and San Francisco. With the responsibility for protecting data at the central facility and remote sites it would be logical that AFCEE's search for a better backup option than traditional tape-based backup would conclude with a disk-to-disk configuration that would allow administrators at the main data center in Texas to also manage backup of the three remote facilities.